In early Feb­ru­ary, I inter­viewed Donato Cabr­era, Res­i­dent Con­duc­tor at the SF Sym­phony and guest con­duc­tor for the Feb­ru­ary 28 SFCMP con­cert. In the inter­view, Cabr­era dis­cusses the dif­fer­ences between the Amer­i­can and Euro­pean con­duct­ing tra­di­tions, the dan­gers of over­spe­cial­iza­tion, chal­lenges fac­ing the new music com­mu­nity in the United States, and how he thinks works by liv­ing com­posers should be pro­grammed. You can read the inter­view on SFCMP’s blog.

Recently I dis­cov­ered the amaz­ingly addic­tive new web­site Quora, where peo­ple ask ques­tions on cer­tain themes. After a basic setup, I was instantly directed to a very intrigu­ing ques­tion for me: Why do peo­ple study music the­ory? I argued that music the­ory helped per­form­ers make more informed inter­pre­ta­tions. I also argued that com­posers were gen­er­ally hin­dered by music the­ory, because it’s a ret­ro­spec­tive dis­ci­pline and com­pos­ing is inher­ently forward-looking. Lots of peo­ple dis­agreed with me of course… Still, I’m going to advance the idea that if we want to cre­ate bet­ter com­posers (though I’m not sure we really do—the com­pe­ti­tion is already pretty fierce), we need to reduce the empha­sis on music the­ory, increase the empha­sis on gen­eral analy­sis skills and crit­i­cal think­ing, and make music his­tory the cor­ner­stone of musi­cal edu­ca­tion. Con­tinue read­ing “Improv­ing Com­poser Edu­ca­tion: Less The­ory, More History” »

I’m hon­oured to have been short­listed for the Amer­i­can Com­posers Forum–spon­sored Finale National Com­po­si­tion Con­tent. The con­test was for a piece to be played by renowned Amer­i­can ensem­ble, Eighth Black­bird. Fun­nily enough, this is the sec­ond time in two years I’ve been short­listed by Eighth Black­bird for the same piece, Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby. The last time was for the Music09 com­pe­ti­tion in Cincinnati—same ensem­ble, same piece, same result, dif­fer­ent com­pe­ti­tion.